Drum

Drum is a Reddit / Hacker News clone, built using Mezzanine
and Django. It is BSD licensed, and designed to demonstrate
some of the non-CMS capabilities of Mezzanine, such as threaded
comments, ratings, and public user accounts.

Dependencies

Drum is designed as a plugin for the Mezzanine content management
platform, and therefore requires Mezzanine to be installed. The
integration of the two applications should occur automatically by
following the installation instructions below.

Installation

The easiest method is to install directly from PyPI using pip by
running the command below, which will also install the required
dependencies mentioned above:

$ pip install -U drum

Otherwise, you can download Drum and install it directly from source:

$ python setup.py install

Once installed, the command mezzanine-project can be used to
create a new Mezzanine project, with Drum installed, in similar
fashion to django-admin.py:

Here we specify the -a switch for the mezzanine-project command,
which tells it to use an alternative package (drum) for the project
template to use. Both Mezzanine and Drum contain a project template
package containing the settings.py and urls.py modules for an
initial project. If you'd like to add Drum to an existing Mezzanine
or Django project, you'll need to manually configure these yourself. See
the FAQ section of the Mezzanine documentation for more information.

Note

The createdb is a shortcut for using Django's syncdb
command and setting the initial migration state. You
can alternatively use syncdb and migrate if preferred.

You should then be able to browse to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ and
log in using the default account (username: admin, password:
default). If you'd like to specify a different username and password
during set up, simply exclude the --noinput option included above
when running createdb.

RSS Import

One difficulty faced with a Drum site is building up an initial user
base, as well as a good amount of interesting link content. This is
a bit of a chicken and egg problem, in that each of these depends on
the other. One way to address this is to automatically populate
the site with interesting links. To help with this, Drum provides the
Django management command poll_rss for retrieving links from an RSS
feed, and populating the site with them. For example, suppose I was a
terrible person and wanted to populate my Drum site with links directly
from the Hacker News front page and the programming section of Reddit:

Here you can see multiple RSS feeds being passed to the command, which
I could then run on a scheduled basis using a cron job. Note that to
use the poll_rss command, you'll need the feedparser library
installed.

Auto Tagging

Drum provides some basic support for automatically tagging new links
as they're added. This is first configured by setting the AUTO_TAG
setting to True. With that set, when a new link is added, its
given title is broken up into keywords, and if those keywords already
exist as tags in the database, they're applied to the newly added link.

This means that for auto-tagging to work, the tags must already exist
in the database. You can either add them manually via the admin (under
the "Keywords" section), or if you have a large number of existing
links, you can use the auto_tag management command Drum provides,
which will analyse the titles of all your existing links, and provide
tags it extracts from them. This makes use of the topia.termextract
package which you'll first need to install:

python manage.py auto_tag --generate=100 --assign --remove

The --generate option must be provided to extract tags, and limits
the number of tags extracted. Generally more tags will be extracted
than are relevant, depending on your existing set of links, so
experiment with different values here. You'll likely want to review all
the tags added, deleting some and manually editing others, via the
Django admin interface. The --assign option will go back and assign
all tags in the database to all links in the database, as would occur
if they were newly created. The --remove option will cause all
existing tags to be removed.

You can also define your own tag extraction function, if splitting the
title on spaces doesn't suffice. To do so, define the setting
AUTO_TAG_FUNCTION which should contain a string with the Python
dotted path to your custom tag function. The function will be given an
unsaved Link object, and should return a sequence of tags to add.

Contributing

Drum is an open source project managed using both the Git and
Mercurial version control systems. These repositories are hosted on
both GitHub and Bitbucket respectively, so contributing is as
easy as forking the project on either of these sites and committing
back your enhancements.

Please note the following guidelines for contributing:

Contributed code must be written in the existing style. This is
as simple as following the Django coding style and (most
importantly) PEP 8.

Contributions must be available on a separately named branch
based on the latest version of the main branch.

Run the tests before committing your changes. If your changes
cause the tests to break, they won't be accepted.

If you are adding new functionality, you must include basic tests
and documentation.

Donating

If you would like to make a donation to continue development of
Drum, you can do so via the Mezzanine Project website.

Support

To report a security issue, please send an email privately to
security@jupo.org. This gives us a chance to fix the issue and
create an official release prior to the issue being made
public.